Synopsis
It's the summer of 1942 at radio station WHAR on the New Jersey coast. As bombs fall on Britain, a troupe of gallant actors, sound effects people, writers, and producers explores the promise of this exhilarating medium, struggling to create programming that entertains, informs, and enlightens its listeners.
Into this intense community come Jack Dulaney and Holly Carnahan, determined to find Holly's missing father, who sent his last desperate missive from this noisy seaside town. Holly sings like an angel and quickly becomes a star. Jack -- a onetime novelist who's hit every kind of trouble -- gets hooked by the extraordinary power of radio and discovers that he can write scripts with the best of them.
Holly's father is nowhere to be found, and soon it seems that his disappearance may be linked to an English actor who walked out of the station six years earlier and was never seen again. It is a link that sonic people will do anything to hide -- including murder.
Like E. L....
Publishers Weekly
Dunning's obvious love for radio as a medium of artistic expression and his knowledge of its history go a long way toward redeeming an occasionally heavy-handed narrative that takes a turn for melodrama several times too often. It's May 1942, and Jack Delaney--32, a published but impoverished Southern novelist and short story writer--is working in the stables of a racetrack in Oakland, Calif. A fight with some soldiers who mistake Jack's draft deferment (he is deaf in one ear) for cowardice puts him in a work camp until his traveling companion, an out-of-work radio actor named Kendall, helps him escape. But Kendall is soon killed, sending Jack on a complicated chase cross-country, seeking the girl he left behind and her father, who seems to have stirred things up by mailing Jack some top-secret material. Gaines manages to bring to life a large cast of eccentric radio types, Nazi spies and IRA sympathizers: all that's missing is real sound effects to make this an elongated version of "The Shadow" or "Secret Agent X-9." Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover. (Jan.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.